Every month a few thousand Canadian businesses open and a few thousand close. In two of the most recent months on record, construction was among the largest contributors to the net loss.
Headline figure
62.6%
Construction’s share of the entire net decline in active Canadian businesses in December 2025. Statistics Canada reports that “The decrease in the overall number of active businesses was driven by construction (−184 businesses compared with November, making a 62.6% contribution to the decline in the overall number of active businesses)” — released 23 March 2026.
What the data says
Statistics Canada publishes monthly experimental estimates of business openings and closures from Table 33-10-0270-01. A business counts as open in a month if it had payroll activity and closed if it did not; a business that stops and later restarts is recorded as a closure and then a reopening rather than a death and a birth. That distinction is why the reopening rate runs at roughly double the entry rate.
| Measure | December 2025 | January 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Opening rate | 4.8% | 4.9% |
| — of which entry rate | not stated | 1.6% |
| — of which reopening rate | not stated | 3.3% |
| Closure rate | 4.8% | 5.0% |
| Change in active businesses | −0.1% (−659) | −0.2% (−1,584) |
| Construction contribution to that change | −184 (62.6%) | −244 (16.1%) |
Sources: Statistics Canada, Monthly estimates of business openings and closures, December 2025, released 23 March 2026, and the same series for January 2026, released 29 April 2026; underlying series Table 33-10-0270-01. Cells marked “not stated” are figures the December release does not break out — they are left blank rather than estimated.
The January 2026 release ranks the industries behind the net decline in active businesses: “professional services (-295 businesses; 19.4% contribution), construction (-244 businesses; 16.1%), retail trade (-240 businesses; 15.8%), and transportation/warehousing (-221 businesses; 14.6%)”. Construction was second of the four named, in a month when the decline was spread fairly widely. In December it was first, and by a very large margin — nearly two-thirds of the entire national net decline came from one industry.
Two months is a pattern worth noticing and not a trend worth asserting. Both are winter months, and construction is among the most seasonal major industries in the country, so a December and January contraction in a series that counts payroll activity is partly the weather. What the figures do establish reliably is scale: construction is large enough and volatile enough to set the direction of the national number on its own.
These releases give industry detail as raw count changes and as a percentage contribution to the national net change. They do not publish an opening rate or a closure rate for construction on its own. So a claim such as “X% of construction businesses close each year” cannot be supported from this source, and this page does not make one. The defensible statement is the one above: construction contributed −184 businesses in December 2025 and −244 in January 2026 to a shrinking national total.
Set this against the structure of the industry. As how small Canadian construction firms really are shows, 61.9% of construction employers have four employees or fewer, and most establishments have no employees at all. A population of that composition will always show high churn: a firm of two people that pauses for a season registers as a closure, and the same firm restarting registers as a reopening. The opening and closure rates are therefore measuring intermittency at least as much as they measure business failure.
For the demand these businesses are opening and closing into, see building permit values by province; for who they employ while they are open, who actually works in Canadian construction.
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